Writing this as a (somewhat belated now) birthday present for one of my Tumblr friends, combination-nc. You can read her writings here on ffnet as well - check my favourite authors list for the link to her profile. She's also the fiendish mind behind the Character Exploration Alphabet meme, and has done a lovely alphabet about Karl Thekla and is now working on a matching Anders alphabet. And a Ser Pounce-A-Lot one!
Isabela could tell it was going to be a turbulent flight, even with them still pulled up at the terminal and loading. While she kept a professional smile on her face, mentally she was cursing; she wasn't even supposed to be on this flight. She was supposed to be on vacation this week. But with several air hosts down with a flu that had been going around, Hawke Airways had found itself unexpectedly short-staffed; early this morning management had offered her overtime pay for her to cut short her vacation and help out. Considering management had been tucked up in bed beside her at the time, giving her that look of his out of big brown eyes, she'd found it impossible to say no. And so here she was, eyeing the passengers boarding for a lengthy trans-Atlantic flight, and really, really wishing she'd told him no after all, rolled over, and gone back to sleep for a while before enjoying the remainder of her well-earned vacation.
She ran a practised eye over the rear section, where she currently was; tourist class, though on Hawke Airways, which flew only small jets catering almost exclusively to executive business travellers, even their tourist seating was as good – and as expensive – as business class on any of the major airlines. Only a dozen seats, and all but one were booked today.
The four seats at the back were taken by a middle-aged couple with twin infants, the red-haired and freckled wife currently stowing the cooler that was likely holding milk for the two. Her husband, a gruff-looking man with bushy mutton-chop whiskers, was making sure the infants were securely fastened in the baby carriers strapped into the pair of seats between him and his wife.
The four seats in front of them were occupied by a group of men, who Isabela thought were some sort of military men, judging by their physique and bearing, and matching heavy-duty carry-on luggage. The leader of the group was middle-aged and had swept-back short brownish-blond hair, light brown eyes, a short-cropped vandyke, and a harried expression. The second man had longish red hair, bright blue eyes, and a handle-bar moustache with a heavy goatee, while the third and youngest-looking member of the group had short blond hair, even brighter blue eyes, and a tiny soul patch on his chin that she thought he'd have looked better without. The final and oldest member was bald, with a full grey beard and moustache, icy blue eyes, and a disdainful expression. They were all wearing some variation on a polo shirt and khaki pants, in dull colours.
The final four seats in front of them were occupied by a pair of nuns; one elderly, with a kind face and colourless grey eyes, her grey hair pulled back in a loose bun, wisps escaping it to hang around her face. The other was younger, her blond hair cut in a short, severe style. She had a rather sour expression on her face, as if she disapproved of something. One of the remaining two seats was marked as being unbooked, and the last was marked as being reserved for an air warden, who hadn't boarded yet.
Business class seats started ahead of that, only two per row, the seats being rather wider and more widely spaced than the rear seating; they could be lowered right down flat to serve as beds for particularly lengthy flights, one of the many features that had won Hawke Airways a following among high-end travellers.
The first pair of them was occupied by a statuesque platinum blond woman with cold blue eyes, her lips currently pursed together in distaste as she glanced around the interior of the small plane. Her outfit was all of a piece; a nicely-fitted skirt suit over a satin blouse, with a leather briefcase, and high heels, which along with her long-nailed manicure and matte lipstick was all of the exact same shade of dark ruby red, a near match for the sizable stone in a pendant hanging around her neck. Her companion was more soberly dressed, in a beautifully tailored double-breasted three-piece suit in charcoal grey over a pearly grey shirt, the only touches of colour a tie the same dark red as the woman wore, along with gold cuff links and tie clip and a gold fountain pen peeking out of his pocket. He was an older man, slight of figure – he only came up a little over the woman's shoulder – and had a receding hairline, his surprisingly lengthy silver hair sweeping dramatically back from a widow's peak, giving him a rather poetic look. He had the most gorgeous almond-shaped green eyes Isabela had ever seen; a real silver fox of a man, if you liked your men mature.
Seated in front of them were a pair of passengers that Isabela knew well; they'd been regular customers of Hawke Airways since shortly after Hawke had first started the business. She stopped by their row to greet them personally, winning the usual grunt and nod of greeting from Mr Brosca – he rarely spoke to anyone save Zevran – and a wide smile and shower of compliments from Zevran.
Mr Brosca was a short, stout, heavily-tattooed man with craggy features and dark blue eyes, his black hair drawn back in a stubby braid, wearing a very plain but well-tailored outfit of a short-sleeved white shirt and black pants. Rumour had it he'd been involved with the Carta before going straight, and that they still hadn't given up trying to kill him off.
His companion and bodyguard was even more familiar to Isabela, and physically could hardly be more different than his employer; slender, golden-skinned, golden-haired, and golden-eyed, and as given to verbosity as his boss was given to silence. She'd known Zevran Arainai for years, from all the way back when she'd been young, naive, and trapped in a broken marriage.
She'd been married off at a rather young age to please her very traditionally minded mother, an arranged marriage that she'd had little say in, not even meeting her husband until a week before the ceremony. Things had not gone well, and she'd been deeply unhappy by the time she eventually met and had a fling with Zevran; he'd taught her that sex could actually be fun with the right person, and that eventually led to her divorce, and a much more pleasant single life. Her only gains from the marriage had been a real land-boat of a car she'd driven off in the day she decided to run away and file for divorce, and the cash and jewellery collection from the bedroom safe that she'd taken along with her. The car was long-since gone, totalled in a nasty crash some years before that she'd been lucky to walk away from unscathed, though she still had most of the jewellery, much of it massive pieces of more value for their antiquity and workmanship than for the gold they were made of.
She had only pleasant memories of her time with Zevran, and quite enjoyed the scandalously flirtatious manner of the man, though she had a strong suspicion he was Mr Brosca's companion in more than just name; she hadn't missed noticing the discrete pair of matching earrings the two had taken to wearing some years before, nor the amused tolerance with which Mr Brosca viewed Zevran's flirting with anything that breathed. Nor the way he could quell Zevran's more outrageous behaviour with nothing more than a well-timed throat clearing and a slight raise of one bushy eyebrow.
"I know I've told you this before, my dear," Zevran said, giving her a warmly appreciative look, "But I love that outfit on you. Hawke chose well when he went for that delicious look for your uniforms."
Isabela smiled and thanked him before moving on. She rather liked the outfit herself, a white mini-skirt dress with matching thigh-high go-go boots in shiny white vinyl, and a colourful scarf tied headband-style around her head. Hawke, she knew, claimed to be trying to appeal to the nostalgia of the hey-dey of modern air travel with the retro uniforms, though she thought it had more of a 70s disco feel to it than a 50s or 60s look. Her own belief was that he just enjoyed oogling female air hosts in skimpy little outfits. Though he did have the male air hosts wearing a similarly retro getup, of white flared pants and open-front short-sleeved white shirts, and a scarf knotted around their neck.
Seated by himself in front of them was a familiar figure, another frequent passenger, Dr Anders Tjäder, though he preferred being called by his first name, saying it was far easily for most people to remember and get right on the first try than Tjäder was. He wasn't wearing his usual dark blue suit, and was dressed instead in grey slacks and a cream-coloured Arran sweater, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
"Taking some vacation time, Dr Anders?" she asked with a welcoming smile.
"Yes," he said, sounding faintly surprised. "How'd you guess?" he asked, then glanced down at himself. "Oh, wait... never mind. I think I just figured it out," he said, and grinned affably at her before she moved on to the next seat.
Isabela moved on to check on the next row of seats, the first of the executive class seating. The seats were much the same as the business class ones, but had swivelling bases that allowed a wider range of seat positions, and a work-surface shared by each pair of seats, complete with electrical plug-ins and adjustable task lights so that the passengers could work in comfort even during flight. There was also a blackout curtain that could be drawn closed around each pair of seats for greater privacy when sleeping.
She had to smile as she took in the first pair seated there; they'd never flown Hawke Airways before, at least not that she'd ever heard of, but they were instantly recognizable to anyone interested in music. Saemus Dumar, wearing tight black leather pants and a loose tunic of slubbed silk only a couple of shades darker than his infamous brilliant turquoise eyes. He smiled sweetly up at her for a moment, then turned back to his companion, a huge man with skin even darker than Isabela's and a mass of waist-long skinny dreadlocks caught back with a leather thong. Ashaad, Saemus' songwriting partner and the man who'd reportedly discovered the youth and nurtured his talent. They had several sheets of music spread out on the work-surface between them, clearly busy working on something.
Given Saemus and Ashaad's presence on the plane, she supposed she shouldn't have been entirely surprised to see who was occupying the next two rows, the front pair of seats having been turned around to face the back pair. The head of Viddathari Studios himself, Mr Aris Shaw, and two of his bodyguards. He was neatly dressed in a blue-grey silk suit over a burgundy shirt, his long silky white hair flowing smoothly down over his shoulders. He was reading over a folder full of documents, a laptop open before him. He was even larger than his two extra-large-sizable bodyguards, who had the same white hair as he did, except drawn back in tight cornrow braids. They all looked much alike – Aris, his bodyguards, and Ashaad as well, for that matter – distant cousins all of them, supposedly, Mr Shaw liking to keep as much of his business as he could within his own family. His family apparently ran to tall and broad-shouldered, with Aris the largest of the bunch, the prematurely white hair shared by most of them a family trait.
Mr Shaw's business interests were much more extensive than just the music studio, of course; that was just one of several businesses under the Qunari Industries umbrella, though also the one he was reportedly most directly managing at present. He'd even briefly been a rival of Hawke's, until he'd decided to divest himself of his own luxury airline business in the aftermath of a rather nasty price-war between the two.
"Mr Shaw, a pleasure to have you travelling with us today," she said, smiling warmly at the man, whom she'd met socially once or twice in the past.
He looked up at her, face inscrutable for a moment, then snorted and smiled slightly and spoke, his voice a pleasantly deep rumble. "Isabela. How many times must I ask you to call me Aris before you'll actually remember to do so?"
"As many times as I remind her not to be too casual with the paying customers," a familiar voice said from behind Isabela, making her start, and turn her head to see Hawke standing right behind her, apparently having just boarded the plane. "Hello Aris. Good to see you," he said, smiling toothily at the much larger man. "Headed for the big music festival in England? I hear your boy Saemus is performing," he added, nodding to the pair nearby.
Saemus looked up at his name, eyes blank for a moment, then he suddenly leapt to his feet, a broad smile on his face. "Hawke!" he exclaimed, with every evidence of delight. He looked like his first impulse was to hug Hawke, but he settled for grabbing one of Hawke's hands in both of his, and shaking it enthusiastically, holding on to it when he was done.
Isabela felt her eyebrows rising at Saemus' excited greeting; she hadn't been aware that Hawke knew Aris' young protege at all, much less well enough to inspire that sort of enthusiasm. Ashaad rose to his feet as well, towering over both men, and put one hand on Saemus' shoulder, leaning down to murmur something in the excited youth's ear. Whatever he said made Saemus release Hawke's hand and calm down again. Saemus glanced up at Ashaad for a moment, giving him a brief smile, then turned back to smile apologetically at Hawke, flushing with embarrassment. With his pale skin and tousled black hair, the slight blush made him look adorably endearing, Isabela found herself thinking.
"Sorry," Saemus said. "I was just so surprised to see you!"
Hawke smiled kindly at the young man. "That's fine. It has been a while, hasn't it?"
"Yes! Are you going to London as well?" Saemus asked hopefully.
"No, I'm afraid not... I'm continuing on to a business conference in Italy."
"Oh! Aris is going to that one as well, I think," Saemus exclaimed, then looked back and forth between the two businessmen, taking in the very pointedly patient way Aris was looking at him. "Oh, um... I should get back to work... sorry for interrupting," he said, and resumed his seat, looking momentarily abashed.
Aris smiled very faintly, watching as Ashaad drew Saemus' attention back to what they'd been working on before the youth had been distracted. He clasped his hands neatly together over his stomach, then looked up at Hawke, and spoke calmly. "As Saemus just revealed, I am not in fact headed for the music festival at this time, though if my business in Italy is finished with early enough, I hope to return in time to attend the last day's performances."
Hawke smiled widely "Much like my own plans. Perhaps I'll see you either there or in Italy. Well, I should stop blocking the aisle and move on to my seat. Isabela, if you would..."
She smiled and nodded at Hawke, and smiled a second time at Mr Shaw as he nodded politely to her before turning his attention back to the folder of papers he'd been reading. She led Hawke forward past a couple of empty rows to his seat, just back of the cockpit area. "Why didn't you tell me you were going to be on this flight?" she asked quietly, keeping her voice low enough not to be overheard.
Hawke grinned for a moment. "Wasn't sure I could clear my desk in time to make this flight, or if I'd have to take the next one out. Didn't want to disappoint you if I couldn't make it," he explained softly. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to spend your layover in Italy with me? I've got a suite booked, and I want to make up for spoiling your vacation."
Isabela studied him a moment, then let her expression briefly lapse out of her professional smile and into a real one. "I suppose I'll say yes," she agreed, and felt a pang at the look of genuine pleasure that lit his face. She still wasn't entirely comfortable with how attached to her he seemed, and had already had to twice deflect feelers from him about whether or not she'd be open to marrying him, a prospect that scared her far more than it interested her. And yet, she did care for him... but this was not the time to be thinking of that.
"Well, I should finish my rounds," she told him lightly, giving him her professional smile, and then continued further forward, into the cockpit.
The co-pilot looked up from his checklist as she entered, and smiled warmly at her. "Isabela. I'd heard you were coming off vacation to help with this flight," he said.
"Sebastian," she said, smiling and nodding at him, then at the pilot as he looked around too. "Carver. Word to the wise, the boss-man is flying today."
Carver grimaced; there was little love lost between himself and his older brother. Garrett was the family success story, the apple of their mother's eye. Carver was the younger tag-a-long, always a few steps behind his brother and constantly overshadowed by him. He'd briefly had an advantage over Garrett, as the better pilot of the pair, but then Garrett had started his own airline and soon turned it from a single family-run company – Carver essentially blackmailed by their mother into helping out with it, leaving a good job with a major airline to work as a pilot for the fledgling business – into the start of a profitable business empire. Garrett had the instincts to be a tycoon; Carver didn't. He'd be well-off some day – their mother had invested what she had in Garrett's business, and reinvested her profits as he expanded, and she'd done very well by it over the years; Carver and Bethany would inherit her not-insubstantial wealth eventually – but for now he was merely a hireling in his brother's employ.
"Bethany's on this flight too," Carver told her.
"Really! I thought she was still off at that fancy school Hawke shipped her off to three years ago?" she said, surprised.
Carver smiled. "Graduated already. Accelerated program. She's at loose ends at the moment and heard we were short-handed, so she offered her services. She's in back making sure everything is aboard for the flight."
"Wonderful! I'll have to go say hello to her," Isabela said, and grimaced. "If this is like most flights, we'll have precious little time to talk once we're in the air. I'll see you two later," she added, then headed back out into the main cabin.
Hawke was busy with something on a laptop as she walked back past his seat, and nodded distractedly at her in passing. The pair of seats behind him were taken now, by a tiny woman with short black hair and big green eyes, peering into a large hand-mirror as she fixed her makeup, and a taller woman with equally black hair pulled back in an untidy bun, a brown-haired toddler held in her lap. Mother and child both had eyes of a surprising golden-yellow shade, giving them disconcertingly intense gazes. The pair of seats between them and Mr Shaw's party were still empty, and marked on her seating chart as not due to be filled until they stopped in Gander to take on extra fuel for the trans-Atlantic hop.
A fourth member had joined Mr Shaw's party, a lean young man who seemed to share the same prematurely white hair as they, though the resemblance ended there. He wouldn't have come up even as far as the shoulder of either of the bodyguards, much less that of Mr Shaw himself. He had large mossy green eyes half-hidden behind black-rimmed glasses, and a dark olive complexion. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt open at the collar, black pants, and had a slim steel briefcase open on his lap, from which he was passing papers to Mr Shaw. She could see paler marks on the skin of his neck and hands – scars or tattoos, she wasn't sure which in the brief glimpse she had as she went by.
She saw a final passenger boarding as she passed out of the executive section; an older man, with short-cropped steel-grey hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His outfit was rather colourful – a dark brown suit over a shirt of a pale muted green, with a burnt orange tie and handkerchief, and a brown leather briefcase. He spotted the one vacant seat and walked to the correct row, then came to an abrupt stop, gaping at his seating partner. "Anders!" he exclaimed in surprise.
Dr Tjäder looked up, then sprang to his feet, a delighted expression on his face. "Karl! Dear lord, man, how many years has it been?"
"Too many," the older man said, smiling warmly at Anders, then checked the seat number marked overhead against his boarding pass. "And it looks like we're sitting together. What a wonderful coincidence."
Isabela had reached their row by then, and helped the older man – a Dr Thekla, it turned out – to stow away his bag. She wondered if he too was a medical doctor, as Anders was, or if it was a more scholarly title. That done, she continued to the back, beyond the washrooms and into the service area, where she found Bethany just checking off the last few items on the list of what foodstuffs and so forth should have been loaded.
"Bethany!" she exclaimed, and exchanged a warm hug with the younger girl. "When Carver told me you were on this flight... I didn't believe it at first. How have you been? It's so good to see you again. He tells me you've graduated?" she asked excitedly.
Bethany smiled. "Slow down, one question at a time," she said, laughing. "Let's see – I'm fine, and I graduated with high honours last week. I only just got back home a couple of days ago, and found Hawke all in a lather about how many of his crew members were off sick already. Which has only gotten worse, as I'm sure you know."
Isabela nodded. "That it has! I was supposed to be on vacation this week, until your brother talked me into working this flight. He tempted me with overtime pay," she explained, making a face, then looked suspiciously at Bethany. "And he better be paying you the same!"
Bethany grinned. "He is! Though I'd likely have been happy enough to do it at even the regular rate; there's a conference in Paris I was half-wanting to attend, and this flight gets me there for free, so I'll just have to pay admittance," she said, then changed the subject, getting them both back on track. "I've finished the checklist, we have everything we're supposed to. How's the passenger list looking?"
"Pretty good, there's a couple of familiar faces who'll be pleased to see you again, I'm sure – we've got both Zevran and Dr Anders on this flight," she said as she passed over the passenger list. "Everyone has boarded, except the air warden. It's probably Alistair – he's always boarding late."
Bethany nodded, running an eye down the list, then suddenly froze for a moment. "Oh dear. Oh my... this is going to be awkward," she said worriedly.
"What is?" Isabela asked.
"One of my teachers is on board, he's travelling to that same conference I'll bet. Professor Orsino - he was my student mentor," she said, colouring slightly as she said the name. "Which normally I'd be thrilled about, he's such a sweetheart, but he's travelling with the chancellor, Ms Stannard, and she and I... well, let's just say there's no love lost on either side," she finished grimly. "Horrible woman. Very controlling, and with a strong religious bias – she has decided ideas about what fields of research the professors should be looking into, and there's rumours she's used her influence to sabotage grant applications on several occasions where professors have tried to pursue lines of research that she objected to on moral grounds. Professor Orsino is one of the few who still stands up to her; she keeps him on a very short lease. She can't stifle him entirely, he and his work are too well-known for her to get away with that, and he's been a tenured professor there since before she ever even arrived... but if she could get rid of him, I think she would. She calls him a disruptive element."
Isabela snorted. "Sounds like a real charmer. Well, let me know if you need any backup in dealing with her. Anything else I should know about?"
Bethany grinned. "Yes, but you need to see it for yourself. Go see Varric in cargo."
Isabela raised an eyebrow questioningly, then slipped past the other woman and headed through the small door that led back toward the cargo space. If Varric was aboard, that meant live cargo of some kind; there was a small heated and pressurized hold behind the service area on the plane, which could be used for transporting animals; usually just the occasional dog or cat, though she well-remembered the time they'd carried an extremely expensive pedigree Arabian yearling over from the United Arab Emirates to a breeder in Virginia; the horse had received more attentive care than the passengers, of which there'd been very few that trip, the animal's new owner having booked the entire plane for himself, his family, and his latest acquisition.
She passed through the electrical service space, then through another door into the hold, and came to an abrupt stop, staring in shock. "An elephant!" she exclaimed in disbelief. "We have an elephant on board the airplane."
"Just a baby one," Varric said in amusement as he looked up from where he was seated on a low stool, bottle-feeding the petite pachyderm. "Orphaned. It's going to a zoo in England. Anyway, it could be worse," he pointed out. "It could be snakes."
Isabela laughed and rolled her eyes. "Oh, like I've never heard that one before," she said, then moved a couple of steps closer to get a better look at the baby elephant. "That's almost unbearably cute. I never knew they were hairy like that. Its head is almost as plush as your chest. Marked physical resemblance between the two of you also – both short and squat..." she trailed off, grinning at the man, who only stood a little taller than the baby elephant itself did.
"Hush, woman, or I'll have to bend you over my knee and spank you," he said, giving her a look even as he continued feeding the elephant, rubbing behind one of its floppy ears with his other hand.
"Promises, promises," she said with a smile, then sighed. "Well, small wonder Bethany said I should see for myself," she said, shaking her head. "All right. The elephant has been seen. I'd better get back to work."
Varric nodded. "See you later," he told her.
